All posts tagged amazon

Hardest hit by FedEx Corp.'spricing change on ground shipments would be some of the items consumers love most to buy online—increasingly by subscription—to avoid a trip to the store. Free or cheap shipping of large, light convenience items that include paper goods might be phased out altogether, analysts say, because they will become too expensive. Read More »

In the crusade to capture clicks and pull in dollars from online sales, Amazon remains the clear frontrunner. But 2013 e-commerce sales data from trade publication Internet Retailer reveals that the race is heating up.

One big, gaining rival: Apple, which took the No. 2 spot long held by office supply chain Staples.

The iPhone maker notched a 24% increase in online sales to $18.3 billion last year. Part of the increase in Apple’s sales this year came from Internet Retailer’s inclusion of Apple’s online hardware sales for the first time, in addition to the digital sales from its App Store and iTunes. Read More »

HBO’s deal with Amazon.com will make available most of HBO’s library to Amazon Prime Instant Video subscribers, starting next month. It will be the first time HBO shows have been available on a subscription streaming service.

The deal only covers older programs – shows won’t be available until three years after initial broadcast. And some key shows are excluded, most notably HBO’s big hit of the moment, Game of Thrones, as well as Sex and the City, Entourage and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Also not included, at least in the first year, is the now cancelled dud “John from Cincinnatti.” Still, Amazon Prime subscribers will have lots to choose from, starting May 21 . A (partial) list, after the jump… Read More »

ANALYST HAMMERS FACEBOOK: If you’re a Wall Street person, you probably think Facebook is hitting on all cylinders. The company’s stock recently climbed past $70 (it was $68 on Monday night). Its recent earnings have exceeded expectations by a wide margin and the social network has gone from nowhere in mobile to pulling in half its revenue from phones, tablets and the like. But if you’re a brand person–well–Facebook may be letting you down. A few weeks after a Digiday piece unearthed some Facebook discontent among agencies, now Forrester is calling out the company for “failing marketers.” Analyst Nate Elliot doesn’t pull any punches, essentially calling Facebook a pay-to-play environment. In other words, brands should give up on expecting to get anything for free on Facebook anymore, and their fans might be worthless. “Is there any doubt now that Facebook has abandoned social marketing, and that its paid ad products aren’t delivering results for most marketers?” wrote Mr. Elliot. A reasonable person might note that Facebook is a media platform like any other and expecting a free ride isn’t realistic. Whatever, maybe after hanging up with Pres. Obama, CEO Mark Zuckerberg might want to dial up Nate.

AMAZON PLANNING SET-TOP BOX THAT’S ALSO A GAMING CONSOLE: Jeff Bezos is nothing if not ambitious. The Amazon CEO has helped completely reshape how Americans buy everything from books to clothes, has rolled out a slew of original TV pilots that real viewers vote on, looked to disrupt grocery shopping, may use drone armies to deliver packages, and, oh by the way, bought The Washington Post. Now, he’s got his sights set on online TV (as are many tech giants). The Amazon set-top box is coming in April, WSJ reports. The device will feature apps for Netflix, Pandora and the like and will run on Google’s Android software. But here’s where things get even more interesting: Amazon’s set-top box will also double as a gaming device, TechCrunch reports. If you’re on the fence about laying out several hundred bucks for a new Xbox One or PlayStation 4, should you wait? If you’re a patient person, maybe. TechCrunch says that the Amazon Set Top Box will let users stream live games. Will these games offer the depth and quality of the Xbox’s upcoming Titanfall? Probably not initially, but if they can make the leap–watch out gaming industry.

TIMES FAMILY ISN’T SELLING, BUT OWNS LESS OF COMPANY: The Ochs-Sulzberger family’s total shareholding in the New York Times Co. fell to 12% in the past year, down a percentage point on this time last year, as the family cashed out a little more of its overall stake, the WSJ reports. Since 2010 the family’s stake has come down from 19%. But the reductions don’t affect the family’s control of the publisher, which is exercised through a class of shares that control most of the board. News of the reduction came in a government filing that also showed compensation figures for NYT executives. Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. saw a drop in his total compensation to $5.3 million from $6.9 million a year earlier, while Chief Executive Mark Thompson earned $4.58 million.

The shift to online shopping has already turned Amazon into a behemoth, and is often cited as a factor in the decline of traditional stores. And while it’s true that all the brick-and-mortar giants — sorry, we mean “four wall” giants – are scrambling to build out their own Internet operations, that’s only part of the story.

The other part is how small the online shopping industry still is, even as Amazon nears its 20th birthday. More on this after the jump… Read More »

Amazon customers have proven to be big fans of the Amazon Prime membership service, which gets you free shipping and a video streaming service for a $79 yearly membership fee. The company now claims subscribers in the tens of millions, and more than a million new member signed up in the peak of the Christmas shopping season last year. But are people willing to pay more for it?

First up, the good news: according to the CIRP survey, 94% of Amazon Prime members say they will “definitely” or “probably” renew, and that number goes up to a nice round 100% among those who use Prime’s free streaming video service at least once a week. “Frequent use of Amazon Prime free Instant Video seems to be the most powerful lever to promote loyalty,” CIRP wrote.

“The key for us is the seven-day a week delivery,” said Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe during the Postal Service’s quarterly earnings call with journalists. “If we hadn’t delivered on Sunday, we would have carried heavy volumes into Monday and that would have been problematic.”

“We did get a rush of packages at the end, and our people came through. As a matter of fact, we delivered over 100,000 packages on Christmas day,” he added.

Package volume grew by 10% to 1.1 million pieces, while revenues jumped 14% to $3.9 billion in the three months ending Dec. 31.

Comscore has released its estimates for online shopping spending during the holiday period, and it’s a mixed bag: Spending was up overall and on all the big days you would expect, and there were ten different days during the November-December period when the company estimates more than a billion dollars was spent online in a day.

But none of those ten days were in the final week of the season ending December 22, despite the late rush in shipments that caused UPS and Fedex to miss some of their Christmas Day deadlines. In fact, the last week of online shopping ended with “considerably softer sales than anticipated,” Comscore’s chairman Gian Fulgoni said in a statement.

Amazon shipped out a press release Thursday with impressive-sounding facts touting the performance of its $79 membership-based service, Prime, over the holiday season. How impressive? Unclear, because Amazon is rarely forthcoming with specific numbers.

How impressive? Unclear, because Amazon is rarely forthcoming with specific numbers. We’ve plucked a few:

It was a “record-setting holiday season for Prime.” Amazon doesn’t tell us how many people signed up throughout the season, or how many Prime members now exist. Amazon did say “more than a million” people around the world signed up in the third week of December. Read More »

FedEx has a drone expert on staff: Chief Information Officer Robert B. Carter, who owns one.

“He reported that it can operate about eight minutes and carry about four Budweiser beers,” FedEx CEO and Chairman Frederick W. Smith said to laughs from other executives in the room during an earnings conference call Wednesday.

In all seriousness, FedEx has a lot of studies underway in the area of drones, Mr. Smith said. But he dubbed much of the recent reporting on the trend “mythology” and said it’s not likely we’ll see drones dropping off packages anytime in the near future.